A few hours before slamming into the East Coast, flooding basements, splintering boardwalks, and destroying whole communities, Hurricane Sandy did something that crucially changed the national response to the storm—it stopped being a hurricane.

It didn't matter that Sandy was a gigantic (expletive) storm. It had combined into something more like a nor'easter. Technically, it was a post-tropical cyclone, a name that surely has less connotative meaning than "hurricane."

And then the bureaucracy got in the way. Yes, it appears not even the weather is free of red tape. Below, see how the hurricane-warning model looked when Sandy came ashore. When the storm became "post-tropical" (and therefore not technically a hurricane) as it approached land, it dropped out of the National Hurricane Center's purview.

(NOAA)

Warnings about the storm didn't drop altogether. They did, however, change hands to another branch of the weather bureaucracy: local National Weather Service offices. "That choice meant that local meteorological offices, without the NHC's hurricane expertise, determined what local warnings to issue," an article in the September issue of Earth magazine, published by the American Geosciences Institute, explains. "It meant that local government officials had to determine their own evacuation orders from the local meteorologists."

The Earth piece is an interesting and at times frustrating outline of the chaos of what happens when nature intersects with rigid government protocols. Before the storm struck, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the weather service's parent agency) was worried that if the electronic systems had sent out a hurricane warning but called it a "post-tropical storm," the systems could have failed, they were that rigid. James L. Franklin, the chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the National Hurricane Center, told Earth "it might have worked, but we had no way to test it.... We are obligated to follow the rules that we told [weather reporters, local governments, and emergency responders] we will follow."

Earth explains what happened next:

In the end, NHC stuck with the NOAA protocol and went with the suite of warnings prescribed for nontropical storms, consistent with the NHC's forecasts. But that choice meant that local meteorological offices, without the NHC's hurricane expertise, determined what local warnings to issue; it meant that local government officials had to determine their own evacuation orders from the local meteorologists. There was no unified message, such as would have come from NHC if the team had retained control in a hurricane scenario. Every warning would have come from NHC, labeled as a hurricane from start to finish, had Sandy hit land as a hurricane.

So what the change of storm class did was change the message, and perhaps watered it down in the process. "NWS was concerned that if it issued hurricane watches and warnings and then dropped them before the storm struck land (and after the storm transitioned to post-tropical), there would be significant confusion on the part of decision makers and the public," the official NOAA assessment of the storm reads.

Those in the weather media were irked. Bryan Norcoss at The Weather Channel told Earth, "The public messages were very garbled on the level of threat." And this trickled down to the public's understanding of the storm. A University of Pennsylvania assessment found that:

While there was universal awareness of the threat that Sandy posed and almost all took some preparatory action, there was also widespread confusion about the nature of warnings issued about Sandy, and preparation that was insufficient for the threat Sandy posed. For example, as short as six hours before landfall and after tropical-storm-force winds had been affecting the coast for a number of hours, 40 percent of respondents mistakenly believed they were under a hurricane watch (instead of a hurricane-force wind warning). Likewise, most coastal residents misconstrued the primary threat of Sandy as coming from wind rather than water.

And it was the storm surge that caused the worst of the damage. The episode, however, did spur NOAA to change its warning protocols. Now, if a hurricane gets downgraded and it's still a massive storm set to do damage, we're still going to treat it like a hurricane. This is what the new model looks like.

By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or
otherwise objectionable. Although GovExec.com does not monitor comments posted to this site (and
has no obligation to), it reserves the right to delete, edit, or move any material that it deems
to be in violation of this rule.

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.